Archive

In the months since Edward Snowden revealed the nature and extent of the spying that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been perpetrating upon Americans and foreigners, some of the NSA’s most troublesome behavior has not been a part of the public debate. This behavior constitutes the government’s assaults on the American legal system. Those assaults have been conducted thus far on two fronts, one of which is aimed at lawyers who represent foreign entities here in America, and the other is aimed at lawyers who represent criminal defendants against whom evidence has been obtained unlawfully and presented in court untruthfully.

Investigative reporters at The New York Times recently discovered that the NSA has been listening to the telephone conversations between lawyers at a highly regarded Chicago law firm and their clients in Indonesia. The firm, Mayer Brown, has remained publicly silent about the revelations, as has its client, the government of Indonesia. But it is well known that Mayer Brown represents the government of Indonesia concerning trade regulations that govern exports of cigarettes and shrimp to the U.S. The lawyers on the other side of the bargaining table from Mayer Brown work for the federal government, which also employs, of course, the NSA.

Can the NSA lawfully tell lawyers for the government who are negotiating with Mayer Brown lawyers what it overheard between the Mayer Brown lawyers and their client? The answer, incredibly, is: Yes. Federal rules prohibit the NSA from sharing knowledge with lawyers for the federal government only about persons who have been indicted. In this case, Mayer Brown is attempting to negotiate favorable trade relations between Indonesia and the U.S., and the lawyers for the U.S. have the unfair advantage of knowing in advance the needs, negotiating positions and strategy of their adversaries. In the Obama years, this is how the feds work: secretly, unfairly and in utter derogation of the attorney-client privilege.

The report that the FBI had a human resource in direct contact with Bin Laden in 1993 – and covered it up and hid it from the 9/11 Commission and Congress – is newsworthy. See Washington Times’ report and NBC News coverage.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg:

Top American officials admit that the U.S. armed and supported Bin Laden and the other Mujahadin – which later morphed into Al Qaeda – in the 1970s, in order to fight the Soviets

The mainstream French paper Le Figaro alleged that the CIA met with Bin Laden himself 2 months before 9/11

An FBI informant hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000. Specifically, the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000. And see this Newsweek article and this New York Times report

According to the large French newspaper Le Monde, the intelligence services of America’s close ally France and of other governments had infiltrated the highest levels of Al-Qaeda’s camps, and actually listened to the hijackers’ debates about which airlines’ planes should be hijacked, and allied intelligence services also intercepted phone conversations between Al-Qaeda members regarding the attacks

According to reports from Bloomberg, an ABC News investigative reporter and others, one of the main trainers of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda worked at various times for the CIA, FBI and Green Berets

A high-level military intelligence officer says that his unit – tasked with tracking Bin Laden prior to 9/11 – was pulled off the task, and their warnings that the World Trade Center and Pentagon were being targeted were ignored

Several key employees for the defense department say that the government covered up their testimony about tracking Mohammed Atta before 9/11

The National Security Agency and the FBI were each independently listening in on the phone calls between the supposed mastermind of the attacks and the lead hijacker. Indeed, the FBI built its own antenna in Madagascar specifically to listen in on the mastermind’s phone calls

According to various sources, on the day before 9/11, the mastermind told the lead hijacker “tomorrow is zero hour” and gave final approval for the attacks. The NSA intercepted the message that day and the FBI was likely also monitoring the mastermind’s phone calls

Shortly before 9/11, the NSA also intercepted multiple phone calls to the United States from Bin Laden’s chief of operations

The CIA and the NSA had been intercepting phone calls by the hijackers for years (see also this)

According to the Sunday Herald, two days before 9/11, Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her “In two days, you’re going to hear big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” U.S. officials later told CNN that “in recent years they’ve been able to monitor some of bin Laden’s telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded.” Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.

And according to CBS News, at 9:53 a.m on 9/11, just 15 minutes after the hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon, “the National Security Agency, which monitors communications worldwide, intercepted a phone call from one of Osama bin Laden’s operatives in Afghanistan to a phone number in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia”, and secretary of Defense Rumsfeld learned about the intercepted phone call in real-time (if the NSA monitored and transcribed phone calls in real-time on 9/11, that implies that it did so in the months leading up to 9/11 as well)

Indeed, former counter-terrorism boss Richard Clarke theorizes that top CIA brass tried to recruit the hijackers and turn them to our side, but were unsuccessful. And – when they realized had failed – they covered up their tracks so that the FBI would not investigate their illegal CIA activities , “malfeasance and misfeasance”, on U.S. soil.

And former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds – deemed credible by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, several senators (free subscription required), and a coalition of prominent conservative and liberal groups – alleges that the U.S. worked with Bin Laden right up to 9/11 … and for months afterwards.

Whether or not she’s right, it’s indisputable that 9/11 was entirely foreseeable … as was Al Qaeda flying airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

As is the fact that the U.S. has backed the world’s most dangerous and radical Muslim terrorists for decades.

Dr. William Pepper speaking for AE911Truth and ReThink911 in Times Square on September 11, 2013Investigation Demanded Based on FOIA Release Info

On behalf of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, esteemed human rights attorney William F. Pepper has written to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) demanding that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST,” a non-regulatory agency within the Commerce Department), for which OIG has oversight responsibility, “be directed to produce a corrected analysis and report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7.”

The demand was triggered by the discovery that the official steel fabrication drawings of Building 7’s construction, released in response to a FOIA request, reveal critical structural features that were inexplicably missing from consideration in the NIST report on the collapse of Building 7. Specifically, as explained in the recent article “MaladmiNISTration” by David Cole, upon close examination of the depiction, in Frankel shop drawing #9114, of the connection between Column 79 and the adjacent girder–a connection that NIST claimed had failed–one can see another steel element in the drawing that NIST had never mentioned, i.e. “stiffener plates,” that were specified at the end of the girder and welded in place to both sides of the web and to the bottom flange.

On the 100th Anniversary of World War 1, the Western powers are again sleepwalking into destructive conflict. Hegemonic ambition has Washington interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine, but developments seem to be moving beyond Washington’s control.

Regime change in Ukraine for a mere $5 billion dollars would be a bargain compared to the massive sums squandered in Iraq ($3,000 billion), Afghanistan ($3,000 billion), Somalia, and Libya, or the money Washington is wasting murdering people with drones in Pakistan and Yemen, or the money Washington has spent supporting al Qaeda in Syria, or the massive sums Washington has wasted surrounding Iran with 40 military bases and several fleets in the Persian Gulf in an effort to terrorize Iran into submission.

So far, in Washington’s attempt at regime change in Ukraine large numbers of Americans are not being killed and maimed. Only Ukrainians are dying, all the better for Washington as the deaths are blamed on the Ukrainian government that the US has targeted for overthrow.

The problem with Washington’s plot to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine and install its minions is twofold: The chosen US puppets have lost control of the protests to armed radical elements with historical links to nazism, and Russia regards an EU/NATO takeover of Ukraine as a strategic threat to Russian independence.

“I hope that this material will be made available to the wider international academic community in order to foster a wider, fact-based discussion among researchers and students alike.”

Friedrich Steinhäusler
Professor of Physics at Salzburg University
Former Co-Director of the NATO ARW on Catastrophic Terrorism
Past Chairman, US/German Transatlantic Expert Group on Terrorism

“Academic freedom protects scholars who report inconvenient truths from the uninformed, but, as Adnan Zuberi reminds us, academic freedom is also the responsibility of scholars to pursue the truth.”

Dr. Roger W. Bowen
Served as General Secretary of the American Association of University Professors
Professor of Political Science and President of the State University of New York.

“This documentary confronts the academy’s uncritical response to the defining event of our times. It is an essential viewing for everyone in academe.”

Lance deHaven-Smith
Professor of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University
Former President of the Florida Political Science Association

“9/11 in the Academic Community”, awarded for “Documentary Achievement” at the University of Toronto Film Festival, can be ordered through its website. “9/11 in the Academic Community” takes a critical look at the academic community’s treatment of critical perspectives on 9/11 by exploring the taboo that shields the American government’s narrative from scholarly examination. Its director / producer Adnan Zuberi is 26 years old and graduated from the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo (theoretical physics). He lives as an independent filmmaker in Toronto, Canada.

Lars Schall: Why did you become interested in the topic of 9/11 in general?

Adnan Zuberi: Of the many ways I became interested, I was most interested in academia’s treatment of critical perspectives on 9/11. During my time as a university student, I noticed that there was a much larger picture that required intellectual attention. For example, Maj. Gen. Mark O. Schissler, who served as the Pentagon’s Deputy Director for the War on Terrorism, said to the Washington Times that this War on Terror is a generational war that will last 50 to 100 years. Schissler emphasized that politics should not interfere with this and the public needs to be committed to this long-duration war. (1) I became interested in documenting how many professors are harsh critics of various aspects of the War on Terror but most unusually, they accept without any critical examination, the narrative serving as the foundation for this war. No thinking person would ever commit to a vague 100 year war, or even a 5 year war, without examining its foundation. More importantly, how can one conclude that the War on Terror will last this long? As to how they arrived at these large numbers is itself suspicious as they indicate more of a geostrategic plan for expanding an empire for this century in view of scare resources and competing regional powers. How can professors not question the foundation of such a suspicious long-duration war? So I began studying the mechanisms that structure intellectual thinking in this manner, exploring the nature and dimensions of the taboo surrounding critical perspectives on 9/11 within universities.

Here, at least, is a place to start: intelligence officials have weighed in with an estimate of just how many secret files National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden took with him when he headed for Hong Kong last June. Brace yourself: 1.7 million. At least they claim that as the number he or his web crawler accessed before he left town. Let’s assume for a moment that it’s accurate and add a caveat. Whatever he had with him on those thumb drives when he left the agency, Edward Snowden did not take all the NSA’s classified documents. Not by a long shot. He only downloaded a portion of them. We don’t have any idea what percentage, but assumedly millions of NSA secret documents did not get the Snowden treatment.

Such figures should stagger us and what he did take will undoubtedly occupy journalists for months or years more (and historians long after that). Keep this in mind, however: the NSA is only one of 17 intelligence outfits in what is called the U.S. Intelligence Community. Some of the others are as large and well funded, and all of them generate their own troves of secret documents, undoubtedly stretching into the many millions.

And keep something else in mind: that’s just intelligence agencies. If you’re thinking about the full sweep of our national security state (NSS), you also have to include places like the Department of Homeland Security, the Energy Department (responsible for the U.S. nuclear arsenal), and the Pentagon. In other words, we’re talking about the kind of secret documentation that an army of journalists, researchers, and historians wouldn’t have a hope of getting through, not in a century.

We do know that, in 2011, the whole government reportedly classified 92,064,862 documents. If accurate and reasonably typical, that means, in the twenty-first century, the NSS has already generated hundreds of millions of documents that could not be read by an American without a security clearance. Of those, thanks to one man (via various journalists), we have had access to a tiny percentage of perhaps 1.7 million of them. Or put another way, you, the voter, the taxpayer, the citizen – in what we still like to think of as a democracy – are automatically excluded from knowing or learning about most of what the national security state does in your name. That’s unless, of course, its officials decide to selectively cherry-pick information they feel you are capable of safely and securely absorbing, or an Edward Snowden releases documents to the world over the bitter protests, death threats, and teeth gnashing of Washington officialdom and retired versions of the same.

Note: The Lorde story is likely a hoax, but it nevertheless captures the truth of the situation.

American taxpayers have built an entire city in Virginia so that the Pentagon, can practice occupying American cities and putting down protests by US citizens. http://www.prisonplanet.com/u-s-army-builds-fake-city-in-virginia-to-practice-military-occupation.html This fake city is the training ground for the doctrine outlined in a leaked US Army document http://info.publicintelligence.net/USAMPS-CivilDisturbanceOps.pdf that describes how soldiers are to be trained to put down domestic disturbances and process prisoners through detainment camps where prisoners will be re-educated to appreciate US policies. In situations of “extreme necessity” the training embraces deadly force: “Warning shot will not be fired. When a firearm is discharged it will be fired with the intent of rendering the person(s) at whom it is discharged incapable of continuing that activity or course of behavior.” Lecturers in the training courses describe constitutionalists as “domestic extremists.”

Does this make the President of the United States, whose oath of office is to defend the US Constitution against enemies domestic and foreign, a domestic extremist? Is the fear of arrest by Homeland Security as a domestic extremist the reason Obama refuses to defend the Constitution of the United States?

The Army is being trained for domestic police duties that are in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act that prevents the use of the military for domestic law enforcement, another indication that Washington has no respect for the country’s laws and that Obama and his “Justice” Department have no intention of enforcing the laws of the land or abiding by the Constitution.

Meet the new (cold) war, same as the old (cold) war. Same same, but different. One day, it’s the myriad implications of Washington’s “pivoting” to Asia – as in the containment of China. The next day, it’s the perennial attempt to box Russia in. Never a dull moment in the New Great Game in Eurasia.

On Russia, the denigration of all things Sochi – attributable to the inherent stupidity of Western corporate media “standards” – was just a subplot of the main show, which always gets personal; the relentless demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin. [1]

Yet Nulandgate – as in US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria “neo-con” Nuland uttering her famous “F**k the EU” – was way more serious. Not because of the “profanity” (praise the Lord!), but for providing what US Think Tankland hailed as “an indicator of American strategic thinking”.

Here’s the game in a nutshell. Germany remote controls one of the leaders of the Ukrainian protests, heavyweight boxer Vitali Klitschko. [2]

“F**k the EU” is essentially directed towards Berlin and Klitschko, its key protege. Washington sees this going nowhere, as Germany, after all, has been slowly building a complex energy-investment partnership with Russia.

The Obama administration wants results – fast. Nuland herself stressed (check it out, starting at 7:26) that Washington, over the past two decades, has “invested” over US$5 billion for the “democratization” of Ukraine. So yes: this is “our” game and the EU is at best a nuisance while Russia remains the major spoiler. Welcome to Washington’s Ukrainian “strategy”.

The United States met secretly this week with spy chiefs from Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The subject was the Syrian civil war and how to better support the rebels, which are by and large al-Qaeda-linked jihadists.

David Ignatius at the Washington Post:

Western and Arab intelligence services that support Syria’s struggling opposition gathered for a two-day strategy meeting in Washington last week that appears to signal a stronger effort to back the rebels.

The spymasters’ conclave featured Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s minister of the interior, who will now supervise the kingdom’s leading role in the covert-action program.

The Nation‘s Bob Dreyfus says this is “a sign that the [Obama] administration’s commitment to diplomacy is fading, and that Obama is prepared to let the covert operators go to work with a freer leash.”

“Sources” told David Ignatius that these Arab countries “agreed to coordinate their aid so that it goes directly to moderate fighters rather than leeching away to extremists of the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).”

Economic theory teaches that free price and profit movements ensure that capitalism produces the greatest welfare for the greatest number. Losses indicate economic activities where costs exceed the value of production, thus investment in these activities is curtailed. Profits indicate economic activities where the value of output exceeds its cost, thus investment increases. Prices indicate the relative scarcity and value of inputs and outputs, thus serving to organize production most efficiently.

This theory doesn’t work when the US government socializes cost and privatizes profits as it has been doing with the Federal Reserve’s support of “banks too big to fail” and when a handful of financial institutions have concentrated much economic activity. Subsidized “private” banks are no different from the former publicly subsidized socialized industries of Great Britain, France, Italy, and the former communist countries. The banks have imposed the costs of their incompetence, greed, and corruption on taxpayers. Indeed, the socialized firms in England and France were more efficiently run and never threatened the national economies, much less the entire world, with ruin as do the private US “banks too big to fail.” The English, French, and communists never had to print $1,000 billion dollars annually to save a handful of corrupt and incompetent financial enterprises.

This only happens in “free market capitalism” where the capitalists, with the approval of the corrupt US Supreme Court can purchase the government, which represents them and not the electorate. Thus, the taxation and money creation powers of government are used to support a few financial institutions at the expense of the rest of the country. This is what is meant by “markets are self-regulating.”

Several years ago Ralph Gomery warned me that the damage done to US labor by jobs offshoring was about to be superseded by robotics. Gomery told me that the ownership of the technology patents is highly concentrated and that breakthroughs have made robots increasingly human in their capabilities. Consequently, the prospect for employment of humans is dismal.

Gomory’s words reverberated with me when I read RT’s February 15, 2014, report that computer and robotic experts at Harvard have constructed mobile machines programmed with the logic of termites to be self-organizing and able to complete complex tasks without central direction or oversight. http://rt.com/news/self-organizing-termite-robots-172/

RT doesn’t understand the implications. Instead of raising a red flag, RT gushes: “The possibilities are vast. The machines can be made to build any three-dimensional structure on their own and with minimal instruction. But what is truly staggering is their ability to adapt to their work environment and to each other; to calculate losses, reorganize efforts and make adjustments. It is already clear that the development will do wonders for humanity in space, hard-to-reach places and other difficult situations.”